Cloud-based email services such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 dominate the market for organizational email for good reason. Dealing with the constant onslaught of spam and online attacks is hard, as those traumatized by running mail servers in the “good old days” can attest.
While email service providers excel at their primary functions of sending, receiving, and storing emails, they prioritize availability and uptime over backup and recovery. Depending solely on their built-in protection systems can leave organizations vulnerable to data loss. Although it’s exceedingly rare for email service providers to lose data due to system failures—all modern email systems are distributed and replicated in virtualized storage—they cannot safeguard against every risk. Here are some scenarios we’ve encountered where a separate email backup solution was useful:
- Recover from human error: This is the big one. People often accidentally delete important messages or clean out old messages too aggressively, inadvertently including critical conversations in a mass deletion. Backups ensure that these messages can be retrieved.
- Ease employee turnover: When employees leave, it’s essential to deactivate their email accounts for security reasons. However, information in their accounts may be vital for ongoing projects or legal purposes. Backups preserve this data for future access.
- Mitigate cyber threats: Phishing attacks are commonplace today. If an employee falls victim to one, their email account could be compromised and data lost. Worse still, the attacker could install malware—even ransomware, though that’s not a significant real-world concern for Apple-only installations—that could result in email data loss. While training employees to recognize and avoid phishing attacks is crucial, backups provide an essential safety net for anyone who makes a mistake.
- Facilitate data migration and archiving: Organizations often need to migrate email data from one system or user to another. While it’s rarely necessary or desirable to migrate everything—all the mail from the past year may be sufficient—it can be helpful to maintain archival access to historical communications.
In fact, both Google and Microsoft explicitly state that they store data for only a limited time and recommend employing a backup service. (The specifics may differ, but generally, you can retrieve a deleted email within 30 days, after which it may be recoverable for an additional 14 or 30 days.) Many companies offer email backup services with similar features, but we highly recommend and deploy Dropsuite. We’d be happy to discuss your needs and customize a comprehensive email backup plan that works best for you.
- Dropsuite provides unlimited storage and also supports QuickBooks Online backup. It features a flexible backup cadence, with email backups up to 12 times per day.
Ideally it’s best to keep all data live so you can transition to a different solution to meet changing needs. Please contact us for help picking the most appropriate solution for your needs.
(Featured image by iStock.com/Rasi Bhadramani)
